Contributors

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Preparation and More

Only 2 more days until the Capstone project is due! My idea at the beginning was too broad of a topic or as Kisa says, "You guys have so many great ideas, but you need to start narrowing it down." So I had to discuss a couple of ideas with my RA. In the end I was able to choose a topic that I could work with.That is why this morning the class went to the CIT, Center for Information Technology. For the whole morning everyone spent time researching and gathering their thoughts about the speech they will have to make. It was all very independent work, and I swear you could hear all the clicking of the keyboards going off at once! It seemed to resonate through the room! Many know that I work with the Interact club, so I decided to base my project on Heifer International, which I slightly worked with before. I had a lot of background reading to do, but it was all very interesting, so time passed by a bit too fast. This is really exciting to me, just thinking about actually getting to put thoughts into action; I hope things will turn out for the best!

In the afternoon part of the class, we started off by understand the role of a facilitator. There were small discussions, and then we had a presentation about Gender and Classroom, presented by Professor Debbie Rivas-Drake. Here we basically discussed about the treatment of students within a classroom or how the teachers and administrations act towards female/male students. There was a kind of debate created by splitting the class in half, one side for co-ed schools, while the other was agreeing to single sexed schools. There was a lot of really good reasoning to each side, and in the end I am not still not sure which side is best. I was supporting the co-ed side, but the opposing view seemed pretty persuasive. We even had Avni, who came from an all girl school describe the benefits of going to a school consisting of only females. Definitely a hard decision.

When class was over, Erica led me to see the Museum of Art: Rhode Island School of Design. We only had an hour so it was slightly a speed through view of everything. However it was so beautiful! The colors and all the details! The pictures seemed to come to life! From Romans, to Egyptian, to the Chinese and Japanese; all the pottery, statues, engravings, and paintings are just amazing. I hope to be able to upload some pictures that I was able to take later!*Just something I learned! You cannot use flash while taking the pictures and it is not allowed to take any pictures dating from the early 1900's to present.

After a few hours of the museum, the women and leadership class watched the movie, "Iron Jawed Angels." A very powerful movie showing women standing up for their rights! I was definitely moved by the struggle and perseverance! It is a very good watch!